Friday, May 30, 2014

Don’t you love it when an otherwise helpful article
or blog post about photography suggests you “refer to your camera’s instruction
manual”…? Don’t they know nothing has an
instruction manual anymore? What you get with a new camera is a DVD with a
downloadable owner’s manual of randomly-nested menus and sub-menus of
indecipherable icons and useless party tricks.
You can print out this worthless pile of pages if you want, but I can’t
imagine anyone wanting to if they’ve read more than about three of them and
discovered how ambiguous and repetitious they are.

Anyway, you don’t want a pile of pages. You want a quick
reference list of techniques to handle specific problems such as:

Dim lighting: Bad lighting often results in
wonderfully evocative photographs. Blurry evocative photographs, unfortunately.
If a tripod is out of the question there
are other possibilities, such as the sensitivity (ISO) setting…

Obstructed view: This too is usually a people problem,
like when you’re in the back row of something, but there are also landscape
photography situations when it would be nice to be about a foot higher, and you
can achieve this by holding your camera as high as you can... and using the
High Angle capability on your screen so you can actually see what you’re doing.

Fast-moving subject (or fast-moving photographer, as
in shooting from a car when the driver can’t even slow down, much less stop –
ie the reference shots for ‘Using the
BURST capability,’ above)

TMI: Too much information (for those not fluent in
Internet slang)… Happens when you’ve got a detailed subject in front of a
detailed background. You have to reduce your depth of field (wide aperture, lowest
f, low depth of field) so that only the subject is in focus.

To ensure that you can read and understand this list
quickly, you have to devise your own code. At the end of my next blog post, after
outlining a few more problem situations, I will list some examples in my ‘mode/number’
code, pertaining to all the situations I have described.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

MountRundle is one of the most frequently painted and
photographed mountains in the Canadian Rockies,
and almost all of the results feature the iconic west slope of the mountain.

I have a few photos of the east face shown here, but
none of them is particularly well composed or likely to inspire a painting.

I realized when I saw the stunning photograph by
James Wheeler that inspired ‘Sunrise at LakeMinnewanka’
that I hadn’t gone far enough along the lake, and certainly didn’t get there at
the time of day he must have shown up. And that’s just for starters… I’m barely
keeping up with digital camera technology, and only occasionally take great
pictures.

Be sure to have a
look at James Wheeler’s portfolio at souvenirpixels.com
and you’ll see he is consistently in the right place at the right time… and seems
to know his way around a camera.

Friday, May 16, 2014

A couple of weeks ago I
wrote about a very pleasant hike to this lake that I did about 16 years ago,
and I mentioned that the climb had gone so well that we’d decided to continue
up to Sarrail Ridge beyond the lake. The hiking guidebook said that our elevation
gain so far, from the trailhead at UpperKananaskisLake
to RawsonLake, was not quite 300 metres spread
out over two kilometres, and the rest of the climb to the ridgeline would only be
about one kilometre. The fact that the latter included an elevation gain of
almost 400 metres should have been a clue…
Parts of the ‘trail’ were really hard to get up, and even harder to get
down, but the view was wonderful.
Apparently the view over the other side of the ridge (okay, I didn’t
actually get to the top) is even more spectacular.

Friday, May 9, 2014

a ruggedly beautifully part
of the world with no shortage of mountains, my favourite painting subjects. The
Virtual Paintout was in Chile
once before, not in the mountains, and my painting at that time couldn't have been more different.

I had
hoped that one of the southern parks we'd be looking at this month would be the Torres del Paine National Park, but it turns out the Google car didn't get that far south… not surprisingly, as there doesn't seem to be a road. Even
the almost heroic Ruta 7, on which I found this beautiful outlook on the Aisén Region, doesn't get
anywhere near it!

Friday, May 2, 2014

This pretty little lake is in Kananaskis Country, a group of
Alberta Provincial Parks just east of BanffNational Park.
In 1998 I got together with an old BanffHigh School friend who still lived
(and hiked regularly) in the Rockies, and she
persuaded me to try the climb to Rawson to see this spectacular view.

Being a grandmother of three at the time, I considered
myself to be getting on in years, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I
handled the ascent from UpperKananaskisLake
with no difficulty. Unfortunately, I was so impressed with myself that I agreed
to continue up to Sarrail Ridge (on the extreme right in this painting) for
what my friend promised would be an even more spectacular view. I’ll tell you about that in a couple of weeks.

About Me

Charlene Brown is a Canadian painter who started writing about painting trips during the ten years she and her husband lived in Dubai. The Gulf Weekly began publishing her accounts of painting trips in that part of the Arabian peninsula -- then said they might consider other countries, even such exotic locations as Canada! She had written about painting trips in over twenty countries by the time her husband retired and they returned to Canada to live.